Everhood

No problem for me to download the game (with galaxy or with the offline installer page, 655Mo FYI). So far, great game. More accessible than I feared with the difficulty options.

Your first look will say Undertale, the first cutscene will say Golden Axe (not the last classic game nodded to here), but once you sink into this game, you'll find it's very much its own (rasta) beast. The sense of humour, characterisations and worldbuilding are all tasty, though all left me wanting more. The soundtrack is memorable to say the least. Stand-out tracks include the finale to the main story as well as some of the optional, harder-to-find battles. The Megalovania equivalent is particularly gnarly. For what looks like essentially a rhythm game, the mechanics here are deceptively deep. Battles manage to stretch the concept of "dodge to the rhythm" in new and inventive ways each time you advance the story. New mechanics are carefully introduced in advance before later turning gameplay on its head, while a host of different visual effects lie in wait to try to distract you. For a game that's hard enough (on extreme difficulties) to satisfy any achievement hunter -- rest assured you won't no-hit most of these battles in a hurry -- the learning curve was not too steep for this gamer with motor issues, and difficulties go low enough to be accessible for most. You still get the full experience on lower difficulties, just with much more forgiveness for mistakes, and you can adjust difficulty on the fly. There are also settings for colourblindness. Accessibility features often go unpraised, so I wanted to show appreciation here. Oh, and because it's obligatory on the official Discord (where the devs answer questions and accept translation requests): Green Mage my beloved. Rasta Beast my fluffy.

At $10 this game is a steal. The "combat" system is a twist on the five lane Guitar Hero style chart where the notes are the bullets to be dodged. Using this basic foundation, the game explores how far one can go in turning such an, on the surface, basic system into a treat for the eyes and workout for ones hand eye coordination. With five difficulty options and two different accessibility filters there's no need to worry about the game locking those out with poor HEC skills, yet I urge everyone to try the first few hours on the default 'Hard', as it makes the victories all the sweeter. It also ties into something I'll discuss in the more story-based-half of this review. Music is also killer, with a unique theme for every fight and all of them being varied and executed exceptionally well. The overworld tracks are no slouch either, being of similar calibre in quality if not memorability. On to the story, this will contain moderate spoilers. Buy the game, go in with as little bias as possible. Alot of the good in the story comes from a lack of preperation. To start, one of the tooltips states: "It's about the journey, not the destination". And with how much intrigue the game builds around its world in the first half this worried me, as if the developers lacked confidence in ending their own game well. This worry stayed close to my thoughts as I played on, fighting excellent battles with well written if occasionally basic characters, until I found myself around 90% point. The game wound up a final curve ball, a subversion of the player vs. playable character dynamic. "You weren't who you thought you were!", etc. It falls flat. There was precious little to telegraph such a subversion, and in the end I found it only soured the ending. Which was a bombastic note chart combined with one of the best tracks. This is why I urge everyone to not blaze through the gameplay by playing a lesser difficulty. It really is about the journey, not the destination.

Pretty fun game, can get emotional at times too. The music is amazing, I recommend buying it with the soundtrack.